Esoteric Open Theology?

Wait, what's wrong with garden variety open theology? Come to think of it, what's wrong with plain old theology, period? Why the qualifiers, "open" and "esoteric"? 

Because we -- I do anyway -- need a theory that fits the facts and evidence while leaving the fewest loose ends and generating the fewest anomalies. 

Nor do I care going in if the theory is theistic or atheistic. Rather, I just want an explanation, and think I am entitled to one. Not in an arrogant or hubristic way, rather, in the way a child is entitled to loving parents. 

If you don't want to provide a child with that much -- or little -- how about not bringing him into the world to begin with? Is this asking too much? Or are we truly just thrown here with no possible explanation -- cosmic orphans with no parents? The famous Nazi Heidegger thought so, right Gemini?

in Martin Heidegger's seminal work, Being and Time, he describes the fundamental condition of human existence. Essentially, thrownness refers to the fact that we humans find ourselves already existing in the world without having chosen to be here, nor having chosen our initial circumstances. 

That much is true: we didn't choose to be here, and the world was here before we arrived on the scene.

Think of it this way: you didn't decide when or where you were born, who your parents would be, what your native language is, or the basic cultural and historical context you were born into. These are all facts of your existence that were "thrown" upon you. 

In essence, Heidegger's concept of thrownness highlights the contingency of human existence. We are not self-created or fully in control of our being. We are born into a world with a history and a set of givens that shape our existence from the outset. 

I say, if it is absolutely true that we are contingent, then we have proved the Absolute via the backdoor, and thereby refuted contingency. For even

to say "I do not know" is to imply that I know that one thing is true and that is precisely the fact that "I do not know" (Bina & Ziarani).

A modest thing, but the fact remains that in order to be logical, "one has to assume that there is such a thing as truth before one presents any reasoning" (ibid.). 

Moreover, one must assume it is possible to symbolize this truth and communicate it to another, and what is your principle that accounts for both truth and its interpersonal propagation? And supposing you affirm that our fundamental condition is thrownness, this entails that it is not not thrownness, in other words, that the principle of noncontradiction applies. 

So, we aren't just thrown into any old cosmos, but a logical one in which we can know and communicate truth (because the cosmos first communicates truth to us, i.e., is intelligible):

This is a fundamental "dogma" without which nothing holds.... A "dogma-free" starting point is itself a dogma, though a self-contradictory one (ibid).

For "To say there is such a thing as truth is to speak in absolute terms." So, is there? And if so, how? What is the sufficient reason for man being a truth-bearing and truth-propagating being? 

Anyone who has any judgment about anything and communicates it to others has already assumed that what he tells them will mean essentially the same thing to them, and that they will recognize the truth of his opinion, that is, they will have the same judgment (ibid.). 

So, to say man is contingent and thrown cannot be a first principle, since it flows from principles that are prior to it, to wit, 

(i) that there is such a thing as truth, (ii) that this truth corresponds to reality, and (iii) that he, as well as others, has access to this reality (ibid.). 

That's a lot of assumptions. But this is a man who never apologized for being a Nazi, so don't expect him to apologize for trying to steal first base when everyone knows you have to earn your way there. In short, if we were thrown here we could never know it, and in knowing it we know a lot of things that imply we're not thrown. 

In other words, he has assumed that that the truth of what he says relates to an objective reality that is independent of the human subject who says or hears it (ibid.). 

And now he's really in trouble, for he has not only "implicitly accepted the notion of objectivity," but "Any attempt to deny the self-evidence of truth -- or being, or reality, or absoluteness -- will be self-defeating." Bottom line:

Any system of thought that proposes an absolute principle while denying the notion of truth -- hence the notion of objectivity -- is condemned to self-refutation (ibid.).

Except there's a big wrinkle, courtesy of Gödel, since we also know that no formal system of thought can account for itself, but rather, contains assumptions not provable by the system. Man uniquely has access to a realm of transcendent truth that cannot be reduced to any formal system, such that we escape any ideological or immanent prison, including existentialism.

In point of fact, remove this unformalizable Absolute, and "every logical argument is devoid of foundation." 

Man cannot be certain of anything in the absence of this notion, because as soon as he becomes absolutely certain of anything without the implicit assumption of the notion of the Absolute, logically, he must let go of his certitude and start over in a vicious circle of doubt (ibid.). 

So, no Absolute, no truth or certitude. Any truth must be backed by the full faith and credit of the First Bank of Absoluteness, otherwise we're just circulating relativistic funny money with no actual value. In other words, we are back in college. 

This is all very nice, but what does it have to do with the subject of the post?

Just that man, by virtue of being one, can know truth and has a right to it. And this right is rooted in our freedom to know it. In other words, freedom and truth coarise, the one being impossible in the absence of the other. 

And it turns out that freedom -- both ours and God's -- is essential to open theism, since it is the opposite of a predestination that is in turn the opposite of "thrownness," in that it denies all contingency and instead situates us in divine necessity.  

But in reality we must be situated somewhere between necessity and contingency, so there is an element of "thrownness" after all, only not total. If it were total, then we would be plunged into an unintelligible chaos with no possibility of even knowing it or anything else.

In the book The Future of Open Theism, Rice surveys a number of forerunners, for example, a guy named Adam Clarke (1760-1832) who argued that

God ordains that certain creatures have freedom, their free actions and decisions are therefore contingent, and God's knowledge of these contingencies is therefore contingent. If creatures are not genuinely free, "then God is the only operator" and "all created beings are only instruments."

Cosmic tools. Utensils. Not thrown here, but implanted here in the God Machine for no ascertainable reason. Which is unacceptable. To be continued.